writing need hhelp please

Sep 16th, 2014

RockCafe

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Writing

Price: $10 USD

Question description

Organizational
Change and Total Quality Management

Based on the textbook and reading assignment, “Changing Organizational Culture
to Adapt to a Community Policing Philosophy,” what are two issues
encountered while transitioning an organization to a community policing
philosophy? What barriers impede the effectiveness of Total Quality
Management (TQM) in the process of improving organizational structure that
can best facilitate community policing? How do “traditional” policing attitudes
improve or impede organizational change?

Your initial response should be 250-300 words in length. Please support your
claims with examples from the text and/or scholarly articles. Read the article,
and list references thanks all questions need answered

Many police
agencies experience difficulties when trying to motivate officers to
enthusiastically embrace a communitypolicingphilosophy.
Agencies often start costly communitypolicing programs only to
find that few officers actually partake in the transformation while most
continue to operate under traditional reactionary modes of law enforcement.
Police managers first must create an organizationalculture that
communicates direction and mission before empowering officers to start communitypolicing programs. Otherwise, the agency will have many programs, but
the underlying organizationalculture will not develop a
partnership with the community--the main ingredient required for a communitypolicingphilosophy.

On January 29,
2001, I accepted the chief of police position in Keller, Texas, a community
of 30,000 residents located in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolis. During the
past decade, the city of Keller has grown rapidly from a small rural town to an
upscale community with a high demand for customer service. I quickly
learned that the department had well-trained officers, an adequate level of
funding, and communitypolicing programs, such as bike and
mounted patrols and a citizen police academy. But, something was missing; an
underlying dissension existed in the community. Citizens perceived the
department as an agency that suppressed and harassed people, particularly the
youth.

Officers were
not breaking the law; however, they did not appear as professional, compassionate,
and courteous as they should have. The local newspaper had printed several
editorials from citizens complaining about police harassment. Before I arrived,
the community had shown their dissatisfaction toward the department by
rejecting a local sales tax referendum that would have provided new funding for
communitypolicing programs.

After spending
6 months listening to the public and observing day-to-day police operations, I
determined that the Keller Police Department, as an organization, failed to
continuously improve and adapt to change. It was a competent law
enforcement agency, but it lacked the ability to develop a meaningful
partnership with the community. At one of the first staff meetings, I
asked the supervisors and managers to articulate the agency's mission statement
and core values. Most could not genuinely answer the question, and the ones
that attempted to provide a response only talked about the enforcement aspect
of the job. An emphasis on building partnerships with the community
while providing value-driven service committed to excellence was missing. The
employees were not acting as a team but, rather, as individuals with their own
agendas. Certain cliques existed among departmental leaders and employees. For
example, one clique emphasized enforcing laws, while another focused on
building partnerships with the community. The organization lacked a
common mission and vision.

Police agencies
must have mission statements that incorporate the residents' desires and
visions of what they want their department to focus on. I spent 6 months
talking to residents, business leaders, high school students, and senior
citizens, asking them to help shape the future of their police agency. I shared
the information I gained with the agency's staff at a retreat we conducted away
from the department location. I created a mission statement easy to remember
that contained the essential elements necessary to bring a meaningful change:
The Keller Police Department is a value-driven organization committed to
excellence and will partner with the community to make Keller a better
place to live, visit, and conduct business. Together, at the retreat, we
adopted our new mission statement and the organizationalphilosophy
to carry it out; we exhaustively discussed the statement and the plan to
implement it.

The next step
included building an organizationalculture that would work
enthusiastically toward meeting our mission. The Keller command staff realized
that we would never achieve the optimal level of service externally until we
began to perform at the optimal level internally. Police agencies often find it
hard to motivate officers and employees to embrace a communitypolicingphilosophy because, although managers communicate the expectations
regarding problem resolution and customer service, it is business as usual
internally. The culture inside serves as a mirror effect outside.

The Keller
Police Department adopted a philosophy of continuous improvement.
Individuals and organizations should recognize how adept they are, but they
never should become complacent. Learning leads to improvement, which, in turn,
requires learning. We understood that we effectively could not embrace a communitypolicingphilosophy without improvement.

One of the
agency's lieutenants who understood the vision, mission, and values required to
bring about a lasting change needed by our department developed our culture
around a philosophy he named "E to the 4th power." All of our
decisions, choices, and relationships are built on empathy, edification,
enthusiasm, and excellence. When we focus on others and not ourselves, we
become much happier and content. We strive to proactively create value in all
that we do and with everyone we encounter. Unfortunately, many people descend
into the pitfalls of self-focusing. In our work life, this translates into bad
morale, selfishness, dissension, low productivity, and the popular "us
against them mentality." In our personal life, it results in depression,
addiction, broken relationships, and self-pity. Therefore, we trained and
developed team members to realize that the secret of a happy existence means
serving something larger than ourselves and continually improving. We tested all
of our individual and organizational decisions, choices, actions, and
thoughts against E to the 4th power. If our decisions, choices, and actions did
not promote E to the 4th power, we were not truly in line with our organizationalphilosophy. The mission statement identified our commitment to the
external customer, and the organizationalphilosophy demonstrated
our commitment to each other as team members.

For the first
time, the direction and expectations became clear to everyone within the
organization. Now, we test all of our initiatives and actions using two
questions: Does it make Keller a better place to live, visit, and conduct
business? And, does it promote E to the 4th power? We even ask these questions
in reference to budget expenditures for equipment, training, personnel, and new
programs. If one action fails the test, we do not continue to consider it. We
believe that if our organization spends the time developing better people, we,
in turn, will become better employees.

Our communitypolicing programs now have a meaning of value attached to them. Our
employees are more empowered and receive greater job satisfaction. Employees
use less sick leave, and the corresponding overtime expenditures remain within
our budget goals. The change in our philosophy has secured very competitive
wages and benefits, and employees rarely leave the organization. Now, peers
hold each other accountable using the mission statement and E to the 4th power.
On their own, officers have placed the mission statement on the sun visors of
their patrol cars to continuously remind them of their focus to build
partnerships with the community.

The quality of
life for all stakeholders has improved dramatically. Community support
for the police department has risen, and the negative editorials in the local
newspaper have ended. Keller citizens gave their stamp of approval by
overwhelmingly voting for an increase in the sales tax to fund a building
expansion project. The Keller Chamber of Commerce endorsed the sales tax
referendum and, after its passage, awarded the distinguished service award for
2001 to the Keller Police Department for exceptional service to the community.
These results sent a strong message to the employees that we are heading in the
right direction.

Our external
communications with the public showed a dramatic increase since we adopted our
new mission statement and organizationalphilosophy. The e-safe
program that allows citizens to communicate with our department via the
Internet increased from 495 e-mails in 2000 to 2,565 e-mails in 2001. Our calls
for service also increased from 30,844 to 38,376 during that time period. Our
employees are working harder to serve the public. Additionally, our internal
communications have improved with monthly newsletters from the chief and a
commendation folder in a computer software program that allows employees to
commend each other for actions that clearly exhibit E to the 4th power.

Additionally,
the Keller Police Department made the symbol of our organizationalculture
the actual performance evaluation. If E to the 4th power is the basis and
foundation of how we make decisions and choices, then we have to actually
measure ourselves by empathy, edification, enthusiasm, and excellence. Now, our
individual behaviors and attitudes impact our salary step raises in addition to
the traditional performance measures, Moreover, the city manager has recognized
the contagious effect of E to the 4th power and organized a committee to
implement it citywide.

The task of
proactively developing and creating value to others is imperative to any agency
that desires an effective communitypolicing program. Police
managers should talk with community residents to gain, their input in
helping to shape their agency. Further, all department employees must share a
common vision.

Once an agency
designs a mission statement to form a partnership with the community, it
then can create an internal philosophy based on empathy, edification,
enthusiasm, and excellence. Police departments must clarify their expectations
and mission before they attempt to empower employees to begin programs within
their communities. Without partnership relationships internally, law
enforcement managers cannot expect their employees to build them externally.